


The Devil's After Both of Us

by little_murmaider



Category: Metalocalypse (Cartoon)
Genre: Canon Divergent, Discussions of grief, M/M, Past Relationships, but for how long, magnus lives au, post-doomstar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-18
Updated: 2021-03-18
Packaged: 2021-03-27 02:33:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30115824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/little_murmaider/pseuds/little_murmaider
Summary: Magnus doesn’t know tomorrow is his last day on Earth. But Charles does.
Relationships: Magnus Hammersmith/Charles Foster Offdensen
Comments: 4
Kudos: 20





	The Devil's After Both of Us

When Magnus asked, Charles should have said no. But he didn’t. It was his nature to acquiesce to requests that came at a great personal cost.  
  
The practice space is a shell of its former self-—a cathedral crushed beneath the weight of its congregation’s sins. Red starlight filters through the deteriorating roof and blown-out windows, illuminating the rubble in an ominous sheen. It’s late fall. To an undiscerning eye, the ash of incinerated bodies could be mistaken for freshly fallen snow.   
  
Standing among the wreckage, Charles feels as though he and Magnus are the last two support beams bearing the load of the entire structure. Before them is a pole, still lodged into the ground, the metal stained dark with blood. He hears a familiar _click. click. hisssssss._ He never would have gifted the lighter had he known it was broken. Charles can’t believe Magnus kept it this long.   
  
Magnus takes a long drag of his cigarette, exhales, and offers it to Charles.  
  
“Careful,” he says when Charles accepts, “They’ll kill ya.”  
  
Cold sinks its teeth into Charles’s throat. He’s content in his decision to leave his traditional robes at home, opting instead for the insulated attire the weather calls for. He doesn’t get a lot of opportunities to wear his leather jacket anymore. The heat of the burning paper crackles against his knuckles. He brings the cigarette to his mouth. His lips linger on the warm place on the filter where Magnus’s mouth once was.  
  
“You sure you can’t do this again?”  
  
Magnus gestures loosely between himself and the bloody pole. Charles returns the cigarette.  
  
“You can’t Lazurus me indefinitely, right? Can’t give me another mulligan on this mortal coil—”  
  
Nicotine stings his nasal cavity. “The prophecy says—”  
  
“I **know** what it **says**.”   
  
Charles sees his mental pivot, watches him recalibrate, redirect to an avenue he thinks will give him the information he wants.   
  
“I’m just making conversation, my man,” he says with a too-casual one-shoulder shrug. The hand holding the cigarette drifts to his chest. His ring finger touches the place where, beneath his sweater, his pinkening torso-long scar begins. “Kind of a shitty magic trick if you can only do it once.”   
  
Beyond the cratering walls the wind howls. A terrified, distant scream punctuates the gale like a siren. Charles tries to remember a time when that sound meant more to him than resigned inevitability. He’s unnervingly relieved when it stops.   
  
“Do they know?” Magnus says. “That I’m only…” He bends his fingers into his palm mystically. “ _Mmmmmmmostly_ dead?”  
  
Charles’s instinct is to lie. His desire to protect, even at the expense of his own moral compass, is as natural to him as breathing. But what is he protecting Magnus from? Reality? What’s the point, when there’s so little left for him?   
  
He says, at last, “...Yes.”  
  
Magnus balks. This was the answer he was seeking, but not the one he anticipated. His eyes dart between the pole, his chest, the gaping hole in the ceiling.   
  
“Have they ever…” His gaze tilts upward, fixes on the shimmering silhouette where he witnessed them ascend. “Would they... _Do_ they ask about me?”  
  
“Are you certain you want to go down this road?” Charles says. “You won’t like where it leads.”  
  
He hides his crumbling expression behind a plume of smoke.  
  
“Yeah.” He says. “Yeah, you’re right.” Charles sees that dark glint in his eye, hears the edge of discontent in his voice. “You’re _always_ right.”   
  
He _must_ sense it. That great cosmic hammer poised to flatten him into existence’s footnote. Why would he ask to come here otherwise? Charles slides his hands into his pockets.  
  
“There’s a spot,” he says, “on the Mordhaus lawn. It’s not the _exact_ place where I…”  
  
Magnus’s mouth twists into a wry smile. “...Became a Late Manager?”  
  
Charles hums in affirmation.  
  
“...But it’s the place where I…” He swallows. “ _Resolved_ I would. I was ready, in that moment, and to me, that’s the same as the act itself.”  
  
He stares at the bloody pole. He always wondered how Magnus removed himself from it, but felt it too rude to ask.  
  
“I often return to that place on the lawn,” he says. “I thought returning would provide a modicum of comfort. A chance to mourn the man who was.”  
  
He feels Magnus’s steely, one-eyed gaze lock in on the side of his face. He keeps his eyes forward.  
  
“There’s a divide,” Charles says, “between the person who laid down in the grass and the person who rose from it. That other person is gone.” Voicing this aloud for the first time opens a hole within his guts he’s unsure he’ll ever refill. “And sometimes I miss him.”  
  
A long moment passes before Magnus reacts, and Charles worries he’s shared too much. It’s selfish to ask for sympathy for choosing his fate from the person whose fate was chosen for him. But then Magnus chuckles dryly and turns away.  
  
“I’m not one to think in absolutes,” he says as he shuffles into the darkness. “To me, every version of myself that isn’t standing _here_ in this _exact_ moment is dead to me. All _sorts_ of guys are dead to me. There’s the guy who’s got a lot of Hard Opinions on experimental films. There’s the guy who got, _arguably_ , **too** into knives. There’s the guy who—”   
  
He pauses, twists his head and cuts his eyes at Charles, his mouth concealed by his shoulder.   
  
“Well, you know _that_ guy, _you_ were there.”  
  
He approaches a cinderblock, about-faces, and hisses as he eases into a seated position.  
  
“Physical therapist says I got to build up my quad strength,” he says, massaging his thigh with the side of his fist. “Anyway. What is grief but an albatross affixed to the neck of the human experience?” He leans back to accentuate his point but, realizing his makeshift chair has no back, rotates to rest his forearms on his knees as though that was what he meant to do all along.  
  
“You don’t have complicated feelings about your death?”  
  
Magnus laughs again. “I was dead long before I died, my man.”  
  
Charles’s attention returns to the pole. He can argue against that point. He can’t bring himself to do so.  
  
Magnus readjusts the scarf wound awkwardly around his neck. “They say you see crazy things right before you die,” he says, tugging at the thick knit. “Your whole life is supposed to flash before your eyes, right? I feel a little ripped off, dude! I didn’t get that! Right after I _gluck!”_   
  
He puts one fist into his open palm and shoves it into his stomach.  
  
“Right after that I saw, well, first I saw my mom.”   
  
A veil of despair drops across his features and for just a moment he forgets himself. But the moment passes. He tips his head to the side, a wide Pagliacci smile painted across his mouth.   
  
“Do you remember that first tour? When we got _hammered_ ,” he waggles his eyebrows, “at that bar just outside of Jacksonville? And you asked if I’d ever been to Paris, and when I said _no_ you said _oh you simply_ ** _MUST_** _go_ like the prep school Ivy League **fuck** you are?”  
  
“I remember.”  
  
“Do you remember what else you said?”  
  
“...I said I would take you.”  
  
“Promises, promises.” The cigarette has burned down into a nub. Magnus flicks it away, the ember bouncing jauntily before it extinguishes. “Anyway that’s what I saw. Weird what the ol’ synapses will fire up before shutting down.”  
  
The heart that to this point functioned in practice but not in spirit clenches in Charles’s chest.  
  
Magnus’s steely gaze sets on him again, this time softer, more inquisitive, more pleading. “Anything like that happen for you?”  
  
An image returns to him in a flash. It’s an image he denied for so long, something so far removed from the reality he’s painstakingly created it felt like the description of a stranger’s half-remembered dream. But it _was_ his reality, and reality has come to collect. The moment before his first last breath, this is what he saw:  
  
Charles stands at the stovetop of his Tampa apartment, mashing potatoes in the only pot he owns. The bell on the front doorknob jingles. It’s not a safe neighborhood, but Charles left the door unlocked because the company was not unexpected. He hears the _shunt_ of a guitar case landing in the foyer, the _shiff_ as shoes slide off and socked feet glide across the tacky tile he’d tried to class up with throw rugs. He feels a pair of arms wrap around him, a chin perch in the center of his scalp. He stops his mashing and leans into the contact.  
  
“How was songwriting?” he asks.  
  
“Oh you know how it goes,” his guest replies, dipping his fingers into the pot and scooping a puff of mashed potatoes into his mouth. “Nothing is easy and everything takes time. This needs more milk.”  
  
“You know where it is.”  
  
His guest makes a noise that says yes, he does and yes, he will get it. But before he does, his arms squeeze around Charles’s waist, his nose draws along Charles’s part and he presses his lips into Charles’s hair and whispers, softly, “ _My man._ ”  
  
This time the lie is to protect himself.  
  
“Bummer,” Magnus says, shifting into the shadows. “You missed out on one hell of a trip.”  
  
The grief craters Charles. It’s too much to hold. He grieves for himself, and for Magnus. For the Magnuses he knew, and the ones he didn’t, and the ones he never would. For the Magnuses he didn’t understand, and the Magnuses that infuriated him, and the Magnuses who laughed at his jokes. For all the Magnuses he lost and for the Magnus before him right now that he was about to lose again for the last time.  
  
He rushes to where Magnus sits and drops to his knees.   
  
“What’s up, _padre,_ you doing a penance?”  
  
The sobs come as he pushes his face into Magnus’s thigh.  
  
“O-Oh…”  
  
Magnus tenses when Charles slings his arms around his shins and digs his nails into his calves. Charles wants so badly to grip Magnus so tightly it rips him out of the stitch the prophecy has sewn him into. He wants to pull him free and, together, knit a new reality, a new life, the one denied to him by the prophecy and by himself. He knows it’s not feasible. But he _wants_ to believe in it. He wants to commit.   
  
Magnus’s fingers rake through Charles’s hair.  
  
“I like it when you don’t put all that gunk in here,” he says, the pad of his thumb grazing the shell of his ear. “Reminds me of a guy I used to know.”  
  
  



End file.
